Elegant Bones
by orange crush
Summary: A life of of dependable boredom; or a death by gold that isn't death at all. Elizabeth, and Jack, make the obvious choice. UPDATED 1206
1. Into the Dark

It was only after the lamp had gone out; that the house was silent and the servants had finished their last pilfering of the brandy; that Elizabeth allowed herself to breathe. Until that moment, she lies still, head on the pillow, collar of her shift drawn around her throat, her eyes shut. Her last night in this house, this bed, this life. She savors it, and despises it, and savors it again.

The day had been spent in much the same way, knuckles clenched until the peach-pink of her hands faded into white. She is tense as a coiled cat. It is hateful to her that she cannot enjoy the daylight, that all her old pleasures are just that; aging and dying before her very eyes. Ending. So she waits for the moon to rise, and her secrets to spill out, coins from a coffer.

When the last door shuts, she pulls the coverlet off and pads out of bed on perfect, lily-shaped feet. She dresses in silence, and leaves the house by the servant's door.

The town sleeps, and Elizabeth remembers.

In the aftermath of the fight, when Will is the same foolish boy she's always known him for, she stalks away with her lips profoundly un-kissed. It made her angrier than she's ever been; she can fight and wear men's clothes and scream with the best of them, be herself. And meanwhile Dear William cannot bring himself to so much as hold her hand. He's no coward; but he's not anything else, either. Stiff as the commodore, and nine times as starry-eyed.

She nearly walks into the chest of Aztec coins before she realizes what they are. Glittering up at her, several pieces still stained with ancient blood, one with her very own, and she reaches a hand out in unconscious greed. Her fingers are slapped away.

"Nothing there for a lass like yourself." Jack says, under his breath. His arms are full of treasure, and a crown sits jauntily on top of his head. If she weren't so full of frustration, she might have room for a laugh.

"Oh, my mistake." she spits. "And here, I thought I was reaching for tea parties, French lace and gossip." though she is shaking with rage, he has the audacity to smile. He wags his head like a shaggy dog's, and meets her eyes with uncomfortable lucidity.

"Nothing for you there, either, unless I'm mistaken."

He lingers over the chest for a moment, but walks away. She replays his words that night, alone in her berth on the Dauntless. And fingers the single piece of gold she took, snapping it across the delicate, fleshless bones of her right hand.

Jack is rotting in the brig, like a good captive. He doesn't suppose they could ask anything else from him; like refraining from singing. He also supposes a condemned man has a right to a few good melodies before the deep sleep of the afterlife. Or whatever it is that waits for him.

He asked the guard to shut the window long before the moon appeared. Jack was a gambling man, and hated showing cards unnecessarily. So he is truly surprised when a flushed and dirty Elizabeth appears at the top of the stairs. The guard is snoring, and her steps are light. She crouches next to Jack's seat on the floor, and he leans a little closer.

"You have me figured, then." he smiles, and she produces a gold coin of her own from a front pocket. Or from somewhere else that Jack prefers imagining. "And yourself as well."

"What will you do at the hanging ?" she whispers, breathless. She acts like it's a game, she may as well have just asked him to play dolls with her. But for a moment, he borrows a little of her enthusiasm, and gives her a grin.

"I'm Captain-"

"-Jack Sparrow, yes." she finishes for him. "So you're going to pretend ?"

"I'm going to _act_." he emphasizes, and places a grimy hand to his bosom. "Of course."

"I love them all. My father, Will. But I want out, Jack." her voice is hushed, ashamed. "I want to be free." he nods his head while she speaks, and gestures to the waves outside the hull, and the bars around him.

"All things do, lass."

Next morning, at the hanging, Will makes him impassioned delivery of the words she has waited eight years to hear; and she is unpleasantly surprised that she feels nothing at all. What she does, though, is rush out to him, taking him in her arms and kissing him as Jack drops through the hole in the platform, grinning like a madman. Will, distracted and guilty, makes a sad attempt to cut the rope that holds him, but is repelled by the hangman and tossed back into the waiting arms of a number of marines.

Jack, meanwhile, gurgles and sputters and heaves one last, exaggerated sigh. The crowd is delightfully horrified.

When the prisoner is declared dead, and the body draped into a burlap sack for burial, Elizabeth begs Norrington for Will's freedom, declaring that she, too, found the hanging unfair and despicable, and he's a good lad, really. Her eyes, as usual, reduce him to the shell of an officer, and he releases the boy.

"This is a beautiful sword." he says, flashing the blade Will crafted before the eyes of the assembled. "I would expect the man who made it, to show the same care and devotion in all aspects of his life." Will says something, and then her father, but it matters little. She feels herself slipping away from all of them and their dramas; away into the dark, where she cannot be reached.

I beg you not to, Will, Elizabeth thought sadly. For I don't deserve it.

So it is that night that finds her in the streets of Port Royal, with a shovel over one shoulder and a lantern in the other. Windows are shuttered and doors are locked, though the gate to the cemetery is unlatched and overgrown. She finds Jack Sparrow's grave in the boneyard, and begins to dig. Nearly an hour passes, and she strikes something firmer than the shifting soil covering his body.

"Damnable woman !" he yells, muffled by the sacking. "Your aim's as lamentable as your judgment."

"Too true." she slits the wrappings with a knife, and offers the stringy, smelly bones a hand up. She helps him to his feet, and together they clamber out of the shallow hole. Jack casts an appraising eye over the wraith that was Elizabeth Swann.

"You've elegant bones, though." he sighs.

"Fill in the hole, and let's be done with it."

"Aye, milady."


	2. The Iron & Sail

She had not spoken a word to him since the graveyard. Nearly a day had passed in silence; the only sounds that reached them were the creak of the hull, and the rumblings of feet and voices from the upper decks. Stowaways, tucked behind barrels of salted fish, the smell overpowering their own. It was Jack who spoke first, unable to tolerate the quiet, and thus the reminder of an absence of his own heartbeat, any longer.

"Try to look on the bright side." he said, and pantomimed rapping the nearest barrel with his bejeweled knuckles. "We could be _in_ the barrels." Elizabeth looked at him, but didn't smile. "Look, love, you're going to have to speak eventually. You're cursed, not dead."

She gave him a thoughtful glance; and he thought he saw a glimmer of humor, sparkling at the edge of her hooded eyes.

"Not much call for salted pirate, I suppose."

"That's a girl."

The obvious course was Tortuga- from there, they could quietly gather the whereabouts of the _Pearl_; and ascertain how much the crew, and the general scoundrel population, really knew about Jack's death in the noose. Or rather, how much they thought they knew. The merchant ship they'd stolen passage on was due to land there by nightfall, and the voyaging had been smooth. Once the crew was on shore carousing, the pair could easily slip past the few guards remaining in the cabins, and head for the taverns Gibbs preferred. There remained, however, one hitch in the plan.

"They're going to run screaming from us." Elizabeth pointed out. "We're walking corpses."

"Pretty ones." he yawned, itching the back of his neck.

"Jack !"

"Here, to the rescue." he swept up a length of abandoned canvas and hacked through it with his knife. "Enough for two of us. Wrap it around your head like so- no, you daft woman. Not a turban. A hood. Draw your sleeves down." She did as she was told. It was a passable disguise, if awkward and unfashionable. Jack stuffed a mass of unruly hair and scarf into his hood, and in doing so gave himself the appearance of a tired and disgusted bear, forced into man's clothes. Elizabeth tried not to laugh, and failed miserably, chuckling like a schoolgirl.

"You look quite stupid." she sputtered out. His eyes, always dark and often unreadable, turned a murky, depthless black. Hood and all, he leaned in, arms at her side, his body three inches, two inches, one inch from hers. She became uncomfortably aware that the heat from his body, unlike the heartbeat, was still extremely present; and he filled her nostrils with the smell of the sea.

"I'm sure, Miss Swann," he enunciated perfectly, taking the name between his teeth like a dagger; "that on most days of your life, someone has told you how beautiful you are." Coral-colored lips hovered above her cheek as he inclined his head, to speak directly into her earlobe. It was the most exciting thing her earlobe had ever experienced. "You are, indeed, one of the loveliest roses to ever bloom in the Caribbean." Her own body, in a betrayal worse than the one she had inflicted upon it, unconsciously raised itself, desperately mimicking the curve of his body. "However," he added, his breath warm in her hair, "that decreases somewhat when you are acting like a pain in the ass."

He stood up, leaving her on the floor, face red and as helplessly open as a child's. "Time to go." was all he said, not unkindly; and after a moment, she rose and followed him.

Their path through the town was a swift one, since neither wished to stop and engage in any conversation that might lead to the removal of the sack hoods, and the exposure of the less-than-fresh persons beneath. At a sign bearing a horse's shoe and a sail, Jack stopped abruptly. "Possibility." he said, and pushed the door open. Noise and light spilled out into the street; a mixture of women's laughter and men's growls.

At a table in the corner, when her eyes adjusted to the light, she saw Gibbs, hunched over a tankard nearly the size of his head. And was he- no. Impossible. He raised his head then, forever banishing any doubt that those were tears running down his craggy face.

"It weren't fair !" he bawled. "Not fair at all." he hiccupped twice and took another pull at the mug. "'E weren't a bad soul." Ana, on the bench beside him, gave her own glass dark looks. The rest of the crew seemed to be moping on a scattering of table. It was obvious what version of the tale they'd been told.

"To Jack." someone said, and a chorus of voices answered. "Who weren't a bad soul."

"Just misguided." sighed a familiar voice. It belonged, in fact, to the man in question; who had seated himself at the far side of the table, to better hear any further words about himself.

"Jack !"

"Jack !"

"It's impossible !"

"And to think," he grinned, pulling the hood back, "I nearly missed my own wake." he noticed Elizabeth, at the edges of the group, and pulled her forward by the wrist. "Yours too, I suppose." he gave her a lopsided smile that made her both forgive him; and think dangerous, regrettable things. They gathered around her in surprise, patting her on the shoulder and giving respectful nods that were rusty with disuse. Jack watched everything, and smiled, and did not let go of her hand for a long minute. "Get the greetings out. Done ? Then back to business." he commanded. "Now, where's the Pearl ?"


	3. And Be Merry

She found him in the cabin, at the long low table that she'd dined at once before. With infinitely less pleasant company, though the spread had been more lavish. Barbossa's touch remained in places, certainly; three days could not undo ten years of malicious cobwebs and a taste for ruined velvet. All traces of monkey had been eliminated painstakingly by namesake Jack himself; ropes and perches and a cupboard, formerly a nest, all scoured away by knife and wash bucket. The bowl of apples still sat out proudly; speaking more to the captain's taste for irony than for produce.

"Have an orange." he said, through a mouthful of juice. A trickle ran out of the side of his mouth, and trailed down the dusky hollow of his throat, disappearing under his shirtfront. "They're delicious." Elizabeth could imagine countless such oranges, leaving endless sticky paths under a parade of unwashed cotton. It made her long for a bath.

"No, thank you." she sat across from him in the cleanest chair available. And crossed her legs demurely, despite the pants. "I didn't come to dine. I'm not… I'm not hungry at all, actually."

"Liar." he flashed her a pulpy smile. "You're starving." He tossed her a hunk of his current victim, and without hesitation, she popped it into her mouth and sucked it dry. And reached for another. It vanished almost as quickly as she could peel it; she chased it down with a close relative of the first. Jack, meanwhile, nibbled his daintily.

After a few moments and a brief, unexpected shot of citrus in the eye, Elizabeth paused.

"What am I doing ?" she said, more to herself than to him.

"S'alright." he sighed, picking fibers from his teeth. The gold flashing from between his lips made her think of lemons, and the hunger rose again. He tossed an empty rind onto the table, thoughtfully. "This is my ninth."

"It's the curse !" she whispered, and shoved her chair back from the table. "It's the curse, we'll keep on eating and eating and we'll never be full !" He eyed her waist.

"Could do you some good." he added, but she ignored him.

"I didn't realize… it came so quickly. I didn't know it would be like this. That I'd be so…"

"Ravenous ?"

"…starving, for everything. I want lemons, and limes and lamb and beef brisket, oh God !" she put a hand to her forehead in horror. "I want pie. I want chicken and fatty duck and hot toast with jam, and my aunt's cherry bread…"

"I want a lobster." he offered, but she continued on, rising from her seat and pacing in agitation. Her words soon took on the beat of her footsteps.

"I want fish and pickled beets, I hate pickled beets ! But I want bread pudding and hot wine and crackers, and…" 

"And ?" he said, and her pacing broke. She regarded him for a long moment, turned to the window, turned back. Wheeling like a fencer, she climbed upon the table on her hands and knees; papers and charts and the damned bushel of oranges flying; and stopped, a single silken hair away.

"And God help me." her breath was hot on his lips, warming them to rubies. He'd forgotten how cold he was. "Jack."

"Yes ?" Mad, laughing golden eyes shone back at his.

"I want you."

Jack was rarely surprised by anything, natural or supernatural or anything in between; but Elizabeth had the knack for it. He would have convinced her to maintain her dignity in the face of such temptation; but, _pirate_.


	4. Two Songbirds

The world began and ended with Jack.

There was no other explanation for it; she had sailed off the edge of the world, far from any charted map, any safe path, any knowledge possessed by man. And there were no monsters here. There was only Jack, and Jack, and JackJackJackJackJACK-

"Captain." he corrects, into her neck, only half-joking. His body slicked against her skin and he dragged gold teeth across her collarbone, gentle as a breeze. Elizabeth realized she'd been screaming his name.

After the last shudder, when her throat is hoarse and gasping; there's a silence when their sluggish, temporarily revived heartbeats are the only thing pounding in their ears, waves of blood beneath the surface. He slips his arm underneath her neck, without tangling her hair, and she slides her head onto his collarbone. She knows there's no point in trying to cover herself. Modesty apparently was not mentioned in the finer points of the curse.

"_La petite morte_ is kind to you." he says, breaking the reverie; and one coral edge of his mouth twists in a wry smile. "Some women make terrible faces."

"Pardon ?"

"Ah, Lizzie." he nibbles thoughtfully on an earlobe, pretending to ignore her. "You're fabulously delicious."

"If you're hungry, try the fruit." she giggles. Jack traces a finger along the sloping underside of her breast, and she sees stars. Fingers to his lips, he licks the salt from her sweat off of them.

"Too sweet." the gourmet declares, and covers her open mouth with his own. It is some hours before coherent speech is regained.There's no end to the pleasure, and the need, no end in sight for the both of them. It can never be enough, but one supposes they'd rather keep trying. Seems more fitting. Insatiable curses can be deeply dull when one practices restraint. The Pearl slides on through the night, and the crew snores in their hammocks; and two songbirds try to come to life again in each other's arms.

Time passes, not slowly enough; and even the dead need rest. He feels her breathing change a hair, and her eyelids flutter like a dragonfly, exhausted.

"Jack ?"

"Hrm ?"

"I don't love you." she slurs comfortably, and nuzzles deeper into his chest. He laughs, gold teeth glinting like starlight.

"No, darling." the water slaps against the hull, children knocking their heels on a fence. He thinks about her mouth unfolding its secrets to his own, like the sun shining through parted clouds. "No, you don't." he says.

When she falls asleep, much later, Jack waits for his heart to slow, and it does. It's not the lack of a steady beat that horrifies him, as much as the resignation he feels. There's nothing to do but wait; the course is set, and checked, the island awaits; in the meantime he recoils from the touch of his own skin. But not from hers.

She turns away from him in her dreaming; and he rises, to take his place at the wheel.


	5. The Wheel's Errand

Jack Sparrow doesn't love anyone.

Not anyone alive, if his dear departed mother counts. She's more a story anyhow, a sweet round face above his in the cradle; a couple of games and an apron string that cut itself when he first saw the ocean. Was he a whore's son ? Or a mermaid's ? Doubtful. She was surely more like one of the countless ones he's entangled himself with and then forgotten; a smattering of good and bad women sighing at their windowsills for the moon, or a man like it. She knew a few songs and taught them to Jack, and he'll sing them until he dies. That's as good a monument as one gets on this earth.

Elizabeth knows a few songs like that. It would be worrisome if he could remember why. When she appears on the ladder before him, she sways a long moment at the top, wincing in the sunlight. She listens to him singing.

"Per'aps my love may die in misery

and his boots be battered by the sea;

though my love's deceit is plain to see

how I wish that he'll return to me."

It goes on like that for a while, and does not get any better; neither grammatically or dramatically. But Jack has a good voice, a simple one that's suited to a simple story. He finishes with a flourish, and takes his hands off the wheel to sweep a bow.

Her amusement is plain on her face, like everything she feels. She's honest as the sun.

"That's a woman's song, Jack."

"Aye."

"I'll speak no ill of your reputation," she grins, and swings her long limbs into a tangle on the deck, "seeing as you're already taking care of that."

"You want it done right, you've got to do it yourself." he chides, and offers to let her steer. She stands up and regards it like a dangerous animal. "Come on, come on, woman. What did I just tell you ?"

"It's your ship." she says blankly. "It's _the Pearl_."

"If last night's made you stupid, I'll never forgive myself." he snarls, and grabs her hands. Before she can withdraw and slap him, he wraps her fingers around the wood and lets go. Nothing happens. Her relief is evident. For a while, they stand together, him leaning on the rail, telling her directions and making fun of her rigid posture until she swears at him fiercely and relaxes.

The Pearl cuts on through the water, sleek as a panther and twice as gentle. The rest of the crew runs here and there, tying off ropes and lazily shucking potato peels at one another; Gibbs is trying to finish the same story for the third time that day, and nobody's letting him get to the good bit. It is so average, so mundane, that Elizabeth forget where she is for a moment, and then Jack smiles at her and the warmth between her thighs returns.

"I, uh- it wasn't very ladylike of me." she sputters, apropos of nothing; but he nods.

"Good for you." he says, and pats her on the back. He swings a leg over the ladder and she nearly releases the wheel.

"Where are you going ? I can't do this all day !"

"Can't you ?" he says, and disappears; and she hates it when he's right.

Hours later, when her feet cannot hold her and her arms are bone-weary; as she's handing the ship over to Anamaria, who looks fresh as a daisy and twice as sharp, somebody yells "Land ho !"


End file.
